It's that time of year, when charities do food drives for food banks and holiday meals. If you've got normal type food (maybe not your Mountain Home stash...) that you're just not gonna eat before it's expiration date, now might be a good time to contribute some of it to a food drive. Keeps it from going to waste, and allows us to help out the community.

Don’t stop there. Take a hard look at demographics. Are you in a city where gangs, mobs or terrorist attacks are likely? Do you live in a remote area where the failure of transportation systems or the lack of fuel will cut you off from supplies arriving from the rest of the world? Is your employment situation tenuous requiring that you build up some cash reserves to get you by just in case the job goes away?
Hopefully, you will be able to bug in for an extended period of time. Having bottled water stored away will help ease the burden when you are getting your footing in tough times. You should have a minimum of two weeks’ worth of bottled water stored away, but as much as a couple of months. Again, if the emergency is short-lived, this will be enough to get you through.
If the men on the blog Doomsday Preppers seem inordinately preoccupied with some distant future in which everything falls apart, he explains, it’s because that imagined scenario represents a moment when they get to feel like they’re actually useful. “I’ve got a chainsaw and a pickup truck and a little cabin in the woods and I can get my assault weapon out and I can be important,” he explains of the mindset. “I’m not really useful until something goes wrong.”
Finelli’s not from around here; an adopted Midwestern politeness hardly masks direct, fast-thinking, faster-talking East Coast roots, although he won’t tell me where he’s from exactly. He’s guarded like that. He won’t say where he went to college, only that he graduated from a prestigious undergraduate program and then got an MBA; nor will he say where he worked after, only that he started a company on the West Coast to manufacture satellite communications receivers before a Japanese competitor threatened to kill him. He will say he knows the moon landing was faked. In 1982, he moved back east from California and began designing computer systems for a Fortune 100 credit card company.
You’ve heard of bug-out bags, but the team behind the SEVENTY2 set out to make the ultimate go bag by asking experts — survivalists, military, climbers and medical pros — which supplies or information were most important to include. The result is designed to get the user through that crucial first 72 hours in which 95% of emergency situations get resolved.
Today, Luther says she keeps a pantry with three different levels of “defense.” The first consists of boxes of cereal, frozen foods, and other items you might fall back on if you couldn’t make it to the grocery store for a week or two. The second, her “short-term” food storage, includes canned goods and other items with a longer shelf life — “Stuff you’d use if perhaps you lost a stream of income and times were tight for a few months,” Luther explains. The third is her long-term food storage: Mylar bags full of dry goods like beans, rice, and wheatberries, as well as some freeze-dried fruits, vegetables, and meat. Layer three, she says, is for “a situation in which all hell has broken loose.”
I was actually pretty surprised at this one too that survival food could be one of the best sellers. It’s actually designed for camping but it’s perfect for your family’s bug out bag. If you need food, get this. I personally pack the SOS FOOD LAB 2400 CALORIE EMERGENCY FOOD BAR PACKETS (U.S. Coast Guard Approved) – 8 Packets in my packs but they didn’t make the best seller list due to the fact that most people don’t know about them, and they’re more expensive.
I know the title is creepy and makes me sound insane, but let me explain: I live on a 50 acre ranch and I am a modest prepper (meaning I don’t devote as much to it as I probably should). My neighbor is an old man who I’ve had multiple screaming matches with due to the fact that he’s always yelling and cursing at his wife and animals. It’s just annoying and I tell him to shut up and then threats are made and cops are called and all that drama.
The truck was owned by a group called the Zombie Squad, which was started in June of 2003 by a group of six American Red Cross volunteers trying to appeal to a younger demographic, Huddleston discovered. Today there are Zombie Squad chapters all over the country. They consult on Hollywood movies. And they run an online forum at zombiehunters.org to answer questions about everything from self-sufficient living to firearms.
Then, as the show-and-tell ended, he gave the prize for Best Bag to a precocious young Prepper whose kit included a fishing line, a seat belt cutter, ready-start fuel cubes, several types of multi-tools and a smoke hood. The winner had come with his mother and had dutifully prepared a bag for her. I wanted to talk with him, but when I approached, he asked if I was “press” and suspiciously refused to give his name.
Experts worry most about the grid’s nervous system: 2,000 extra-high voltage transformers. They’re 200- and 300-ton behemoths, individually engineered to meet specific power demands, and on average, they’re 40 years old. Notwithstanding the fact that 85 percent of transformers are imported, the U.S. Department of Energy says it takes between 5 and 16 months to replace a single one. According to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, an attack that destroyed nine of the 2,000 transformers would “cause a protracted nationwide blackout.” There’s no national cache of spare transformers.
To answer that question, I found myself in the Siloam Cafe in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, seated across from Martin Fletchall, a disabled veteran who says God called him and his family to the Ozarks from Montana. He prefers to be called Fletch. Fletch is in his 40s, wears a white beard, a camouflage hoodie and matching hat and orders toast, eggs and steak, which costs less than $4. He agreed to meet me after a few weeks of exchanging emails and vetting that I wasn’t actually a “social justice warrior.”
Always have a backup. 2m and 70cm are the most popular but they don’t have a long range. Find out what the local repeaters are using and use a rotating schedule that covers different frequencies on different bands at different times of the day because you don’t know what’s going to be available or possible until it happens. Also, see if you can practice it. In theory, this all sounds pretty easy. It’s really not.
In the next decade Howard Ruff warned about socio-economic collapse in his 1974 book Famine and Survival in America. Ruff's book was published during a period of rampant inflation in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. Most of the elements of survivalism can be found there, including advice on food storage. The book championed the claim that precious metals, such as gold and silver, have an intrinsic worth that makes them more usable in the event of a socioeconomic collapse than fiat currency. Ruff later published milder variations of the same themes, such as How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, a best-seller in 1979.

Pense invites me to imagine a world turned lawless when the ninth transformer blows. Fifteen percent of the New Orleans Police Department deserted during Hurricane Katrina—imagine if the entire force lived where the levees broke. Big box stores killed off regional food distribution centers years ago; all we’ve got is what’s inside Walmart and Sam’s Club, and if you thought Black Friday was bad, imagine the crowds when it’s life or death. Drivers fleeing Springfield will hit roadblocks, where mobs will pull people from their vehicles like the LA rioters did to Reginald Denny. You might commit vehicular manslaughter, the preppers tell me, just to get out alive.

One of the “skills” every prepper should learn (and learn this week or next) is foraging for edibles in and around their homes. Search the library or order a book on Amazon…one with pictures…to learn which weeds provide vitamins and minerals and how to spot them (and their poisonous look-a-likes) in YOUR neighborhood. The day MAY come when that is ALL that is available to eat because the mice, rats, birds, cats and dogs have already been dispatched to feed hungry neighbors. Weeds are likely to still be around even after looters have torn out and dug up your gardens in search of food.

Suppression of firearms is a good idea for night fighting, but do your research about suppressors and suppression before committing to a 3-400 dollar solution as well as the $200 tax stamp per suppressor. For $500 I can build another AR platform rifle or shorty pistol. And don’t forget that suppressors aren’t magic; the piece still makes enough noise for everybody within a half klick on a totally silent night to hear it.
Three hours after I arrived, Andrew: senses it’s time to wrap up, but not before breaking into one last story about the Bigfoot footprints he keeps in the back of his car. The prints were collected in Arkansas in 1956, he says, and they belong to an adult male, a juvenile female and an adult female. He says he himself came from the “drug scene hillbillies” and that his ancestors had six digits.
Cigarettes will also be hugely useful for starting fires and saving coals (as any fan of post-apocalyptic literature knows, this is of great importance). The filters can be used to clean water, although you'll need the patience of Stephen Baldwin to pull it off. If you do manage to live for longer than a few weeks without plumbing and Internet, you'll be able to protect your budding prepper garden by soaking cigarette butts in water and spraying the resulting chemical-laden tobacco juice on your produce. This is a technique already in use by people too impatient to wait for the apocalypse, though it is ironic and entertaining that they consider using cigarette-butt sludge a "natural" way to ward off pests.
Articles on the subject appeared in small-distribution libertarian publications such as The Innovator and Atlantis Quarterly. It was during this period that Robert D. Kephart began publishing Inflation Survival Letter[5] (later renamed Personal Finance). For several years the newsletter included a continuing section on personal preparedness written by Stephens. It promoted expensive seminars around the US on similar cautionary topics. Stephens participated, along with James McKeever and other defensive investing, "hard money" advocates.
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